Remarkable development here in the Alabama imbroglio. The headline is that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, one of the most corrupt of President Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, threatened to fire NOAA leadership over the Alabama dispute. (I hesitate even call it a “dispute.”) What struck me more is that administration officials are putting out word that staffers at the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service were simply trying to embarrass the President rather than acting out of concern for public safety. In the Times’ words: “That official suggested the Twitter post by the Birmingham forecasters had been motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama.”
Here’s the full text of the email from NOAA Acting Chief Scientist Craig McLean about Trump’s phony forecast and NOAA backing Trump up over its own meteorologists who were trying to set the record straight.
Dear Colleagues,
The fierce storm we know as Hurricane Dorian has concluded its ferocious path through the Bahamas and along the US East Coast. Many of you have contributed to the excellent science that has underpinned the forecasts and current understanding of storms such as this one, which accelerated quite rapidly in intensity. The storm also presented challenges in track which improved with enhanced observations. We know that our collective work, from the scientists in the aircraft penetrating the storm, to the scientists deploying the glider picket line, to the modelers and folks working the physics of the storms, across OAR and in our CI’s, and across all NOAA Lines, we are working the problem in order to give the NWS forecasters the best tools we possibly can to keep America and our neighbors safe. Thank you.
Did you know that a whistleblower has come forward with evidence that Trump administration officials are interfering with the mandatory audits federal law requires for all Presidents and Vice Presidents? I didn’t either! Or at least I didn’t until I was talking to TPM’s Josh Kovensky and he mentioned it to me in passing. And yes, this is really true! (Josh wrote the story up here back on August 27th. Definitely read his analysis for a deeper look at the details.) On July 29th a federal employee came forward to the House Ways and Means Committee with “credible allegations” of possible misconduct tied to the mandatory audits of the President’s and Vice President’s taxes.
Why isn’t this a bigger deal?
In this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast, Kate, David and I look at the current state of the Democratic primary race – along with a bit of Biden war stories and Pence in Ireland. Listen here and subscribe!
In an apparent effort to retrospectively validate Trump’s false claim that Hurricane Dorian endangered Alabama, Trump’s Oval Office hurricane update included what appeared to be a staffer’s magic marker expanding the hurricane zone to include Alabama. Kate Riga has the story.
I notice that a number of people are saying Joe Biden is making a big mistake not being more contrite or apologetic about jumbling facts in that story he’s told about soldiers in Afghanistan. But I’m pretty sure they’re wrong. His dismissal of the whole issue, politically at least, is the right decision.
I had not noticed until this morning (when TPM Reader TM flagged it to my attention) that Rod Rosenstein responded (not terribly positively) to my post on the Comey Memos IG report (“Of Course Comey Was Right to Share the Memos”).
Check out this double-negative logic: "no reason to believe the others in the .. chain of command weren’t compromised by Trump’s corruption and efforts to end the investigation" — ignoring the fact that EVERY agent and prosecutor was still working on it. https://t.co/HwcC3N68ur
— Rod Rosenstein (@RodRosenstein) August 30, 2019
Allow me to respond.
I will return to this in more depth later. But I wanted to address a key point about yesterday’s Inspector General report on James Comey and his memos about President Trump. As I noted yesterday, the report is typical of Inspector General Michael Horowitz — basically report the facts, try to avoid discussion of facts or questions that are unhelpful to President Trump and spin the facts in as friendly a way as possible to President Trump. Indeed, beyond Horowitz himself, the report is emblematic of how even seemingly apolitical appointees (Horowitz was appointed under Barack Obama) and members of the bureaucracy routinely bend their duties toward those in power.
Yesterday I was amazed to see Chuck Todd suggest to Comey’s friend and public supporter Benjamin Wittes that Bill Barr’s apolitical bona fides had been reestablished by the fact that Barr did not prosecute Comey. This is an astonishingly stupid suggestion, which again underlines the way Trump’s criminality and bad acting gets normalized to create an environment in which the major media can operate, to create a bothsidesist equilibrium.
But let me address a key point.
Today we have yet another in the endless story of Trump White House dysfunction. President Trump’s personal assistant was abruptly fired, translated into a “separated employee” after Trump learned that she’d blabbed to the press about Trump’s family. For good corporate measure, she was also barred from even entering the White House today. Again, yet more Trump nonsense.
But let me come at this from a different direction. We don’t know just what these family details were. But a personal assistant to the President has access to the President, his family and many of their collective intimacies and legitimately private life. If she really shared truly personal details with the press that is a massive breach and I suspect it would lead to termination under any White House — maybe not quite so jaggedly, with the equivalent of being escorted out of the building. But fired? I’m pretty sure yes.
But there’s another nugget that to me is the real story.
This morning we saw an article from the Post that is typical of what we’ll see really no matter what Democrat gets the presidential nomination. Indeed, we’ll see it again and again. (Read the now-updated story here.) The gist, according to the Post, is that Biden tells a story of military heroism about a young soldier in Afghanistan. But that story never happened. At it’s not even one discrete story. Over the years he’s told it with different details. As the Post explains, the story is actually a pastiche of several different stories, each of which Biden was either directly a part of or heard recounted on one of his trips to Afghanistan or Iraq, or in one case at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House.